Sunday, July 2, 2017

Staunton, July 1 – “The ideology of
the supremacy of one nation over another leads to fascism,” Rafael Khakimov
says, “but calls for the fusion of nations in a communist or capitalist
paradise are just as pernicious for the peoples in favor of a single ephemeral
nation” and must be opposed.

Unfortunately, the distinguished
Tatar historian and former advisor to that republic’s president says, dominant
nations often insist that “we are all people and there is no reason to stress
nationality” and so any “ethnic minority” is compelled to “stress the opposite”
in order to survive (business-gazeta.ru/article/350299).

But tragically, in
Russia today, “one can speak as much and as long as one likes about the
greatness of the ethnic Russian people, but God forbid you praise the Tatars
because you will immediately be accused of separatism.”But equally dangerous to the minorities are
not those who sing praises to the Russian nation but those who are promoting a
civic Russian nation.

The leader of that latter camp is
Valery Tishkov, former Russian nationalities minister and former head of the Moscow
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Tishkov says. “For Tishkov, a nation
is a semantic-metaphorical category,” something that can be “constructed with the
help of administrative power.”

“It isn’t clear,” however, Khakimov
continues, “how this will be combined with already existing nations be they
Chechens or Tatars, and even ethnic Russians are not hurrying to become [civic]
Russians” of the kind Tishkov wants to promote. In short, he sees peoples and
nations as “the result of the work of politicians.”

“But history speaks about the
reverse,” the Tatar historian says. “The state is one of the forms of the life
of peoples.”

“Americans tried to create a new
people out of migrants” via the melting pot. And it is certainly the case,
Khakimov says, that they achieved a great deal. “Nevertheless, in the US there
has been a countervailing reaction in which people suddenly began to seek their
roots, it would seem on an empty place, in the third or fourth generation of
real Americans.”

“There have appeared Hispanic
American, Italo-English and so on schools. The Irish mark St. Patrick’s Day.
The Scots in the US mark their holidays accompanied by parades in the streets
of New York. The Italians everywhere open restaurants of ‘Little Italy,’ and
the Chinese occupy whole districts as China towns.”

And what is most important is that
Americans “clearly distinguish who is Irish, Italian or Polish by origin.” And
so now people talk not about a melting pot but about “a salad” or “a mosaic of
cultures,” in which “each culture preserves its own distinctive
charaacteristics alongside a combined American culture.”

That experience should be
instructive for Russia, and people should recognize that “ethnic Russians have
been able to assimilate many ethnic groups, but peoples nonetheless have not
disappeared.”

Tsarist prime minister Stolypin “understood
the uselessness of immediate assimilation and Christianization of Muslims and
chose instead the path of dividing the Tatars into separate peoples which
turned out to be a more effective policy although it did not solve the main
task of transforming the peoples of the country into ethnic Russians.”

Pan-Slavism did not work in this
regard either. Neither Ukrainians nor Belarusians wanted to play. And “experiments
with ‘soviet’ and ‘Yugoslav’ peoples also did not give the desired results”
because “with the slightest democratization of the political system, they fell
apart into independent and even hostile nations.”

Present-day Russian politicians want
to try “the mechanism of the melting pot,” but not the liberal version on offer
in the US but a much harsher one that will eliminate minority nations
altogether by forcing them to re-identify. But these “assimilators” will
achieve nothing. “They in the ‘best’ case will give birth to mankurts.”

“Deprived of historical memory,” as
Chingiz Aitmatov defined the mankurt,
“the individual is transformed into one of Academician Pavlov’s dogs and lives
by reflexes. Without an ethnic milieu, the socialization of a human being
cannot occur. An individual recognizes the human in him only by looking at
another person and having contact and general interests with him.This is called ethnicity.”

“Is it possible for an individual without
ethnic markers to be considered human in the full sense of the worse, that is,
as a personality? Of course, even a mankurt
is not an animal, but you wouldn’t call him a human either.”

When he landed on the island,
Robinson Crusoe was “already socialized.” But “isolated from other people, a
child will not become a personality,” as the story of Mowgli shows. And “the
language of robots, machine language, has a syntax but again does not have a
semantics.” That requires a culture, “and correspondingly an ethnicity.”

“We are not mankurts or robots,” the Tatar historian says; and we must not
allow anyone to reduce us to that status.